David Wain, Ken Marino, and Craig Wedren on Jamming Together and their Lifelong Friendship
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OK, let's get down to business: David Wain, Craig Wedren, and Ken Marino—a trio of inarguable legends in the game when it comes to comedy and music—have been mighty busy lately. Their extremely funny new movie Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass just took a spin in theaters, and they also just wrapped a short tour for their increasingly long-running Middle Aged Dad Jam band, which is almost exactly what it sounds like in a very positive way—covers, originals from the trio's long run of collaborations, everything but the kitchen sink. I was extremely honored to get some IRL face-time with these three hours before their recent show at NYC's Irving Plaza, and when I wasn't ducking and dodging the multitude of bits they were throwing my way we got down to some serious(-ish) matters as well. It was a hilarious and enlightening convo, and I think you're gonna love reading it too. Check it out:
This is a small tour for you guys, but when I was younger and I'd go on tour with a band for just a few days, I'd come back absolutely exhausted.
Craig: It's fucking grueling. It's so intense and it's so hard, especially the first three days.
David: Also, we're such a DIY situation. It's not like we have a lot of support.
Craig: Everything's been great except sleep.
Ken: But the trade-off is that it's a lot of fun. It's exhausting, it's grueling, but we laugh about how ridiculous it is.
David: And I've been able to purchase a yacht.
Craig: The rest of us can't afford a cup of coffee, but we're super-psyched.
Ken: It's a joyous thing, and that's what feeds into it.
David: My little joke aside, the sincere thing is it is really joyous and fun.
Craig: Somehow, that didn't feel sincere.
Ken: I was looking at some of our interviews on this little trip, and every time I try to say something fairly sincere, you come in and just—
David: But that's the magic of it.
Ken: Yeah, I know, I love it—but I want to get the sincerity part of it out, because it is really beautiful.
Craig: Also, because none of our lives depend on it, it's actually really fucking fun. It's got a summer camp vibe.
This whole project started for you guys during COVID.
David: Yeah, during COVID I started making little collaborative videos, and afterwards we were dying to hang out in the same place together. So we started hanging out in the garage with other dads and making music for no reason at all, and it very organically turned into a band over time.
Craig: And Ken, if I may, kind of always secretly wanted to be a lead singer. He certainly has the pipes and presence for it—and, you know, there was an opening.
Ken: That's true.
A lot of similar COVID-era projects, as soon as people started getting vaccinated, the enthusiasm for continuing on with them waned for a lot of people behind the projects themselves. But here we are many years later, and you guys are on tour and going strong.
David: In a weird way, I feel like it took a life of its own. Part of the reason we did at first is that there wasn't much else to do—also, during the strike. Now, we're pretty busy—and yet, the machine is moving, and we still make time to do it.
Ken: I think it's a testament to how we've always worked individually. If we like something, we'll just continue doing it. It's very easy to just quit and stop doing it. But we're like, "No, no, we're going to keep doing it."
Craig: It's a relentlessness. We've never let bad reviews or losing money stand in the way of getting to hang out and make loud music together.
The three of you assembled together when you were all attending NYU.
David: Craig and I met at camp when we were four in Cleveland, and then we were roommates at NYU, and that's where we met Ken.
Ken: They were very good friends growing up. In our show, we show pictures of them as they're growing up. Now, they have two sons who are going to be roommates at NYU this year. Henry, David's son, is in the band, plays saxophone.
What dorm did you guys live in?
David: We lived in Britney Hall. I was in the film school and [Ken] was in Strasberg acting studio.
Craig: I was at ETW.
Ken: I met these guys first day of college. I went down into their room because a guy I went to high school with was their third roommate, and I went down to see him and I met these two guys, and then we bonded pretty quickly.
David: Ken had a milk crate of half-drunk booze.
Ken: It wasn't half-drunk, it was all full bottles.
David: He had...pilfered them?
Craig: Swiped?
David: Absconded?
Ken: I got them from a yacht club that I was a bartender at the summer before college. As I was leaving, there always seemed to be a bottle that somehow made it into my car as I was prepping for college.
Craig: We had the jams—aka cassette tapes—and Ken had the booze. So we had together. We had a real party.
David: Not to get into needlessly detailed information, but after we were in the dorms, we moved to 65 Cooper Square and had an apartment there. After that, it was 58 East 7th Street.
Ken He doesn't want to get into the numbers and details. You remember all the addresses?
David: Some people lived at 16 East 10th Street.
Craig: I'm pretty impressed.
Ken: Was that my address?
David: You lived at 301 East 10th Street. Like I said, this might not be the most important information.
Did you guys ever get written up when you were in the dorms?
David: Written up for being bad?
Yeah.
David: We got written up in the New York University Arts Review for being very cool.
Craig: We were always on the good side of the RAs. We were all pals.
Ken: Whenever we did something bad, we just went out into our playground, which was New York City in the '90s.
I personally felt like going to school at NYU was a very specific experience—a baptism-by-fire, maybe, in terms of post-adolescence. I'm curious to hear you guys talk about that period of your lives together, and emerging from it with this creative relationship that the three of you still have today.
Craig: I mean, [mine and David's creative] relationship started in pre-adolescence, in [David's] basement. Everything has eked out from that.
Ken: What was the question? I got lost in thinking about all sorts of things.
David: I thought it was very intellectual, I thought it was a good question, and I had trouble understanding it.
Talking about the uniqueness of going to school together and how that contributed to post-adolescent growth, as well as what followed creatively.
Ken: Well, let me ask you something. What's post-adolescence?
Craig: It's college. Adolescence is early-mid teenage.
I mean, now I feel like post-adolescence starts at, like, 35.
Ken: Yeah, that's what I mean. I feel like we have like a little bit of arrested development.
Craig: We're still pre-adolescent.
Ken: I don't think we've come out of it. That's the magic of it.
Craig: Not our testosterone levels, necessarily—
David: Speak for yourself, dude.
Ken: No, no, you're very virile. You're hard right now.
David: Look at my hat! Look at me!
Ken: I don't know if that's ever gone away—at least mentally—so I don't know how to answer that question. Since we've gotten together, we've consistently created things because that's our language and how we connect. We've found that when we create stuff together, it's not work because it's fun, and the fun of it is what kind of connects us—and it just so happens to be stuff that sometimes pays our bills.
David: I also think that we're always just now the three of us, and a lot of the people around us are naturally entrepreneurial and instigating things.
Craig: One could also say we were psychotically driven, even more so as kids.
Ken: I have found that we have not let go of that intensity when we were younger, where we're like, "We've gotta do it, we've gotta do it." It's still there, for some reason.
Craig: In your teens and 20s, which I think is natural, you're just clawing and trying to establish a voice—trying to make it in this incubative particle collider of competition. That burns away. But we value high-quality work and demand it of ourselves. And then when we get with each other, it's even more intense.
Ken: Because it becomes a challenge. You don't want to let the other person down, and you want to bring your best game.
David: And then we do the band. We just put it all in the merch for the band.
Craig: And the merch looks great.
A lot of my male friends are getting to an age where they're saying it's very hard to make, or even keep, friends.
David: It's definitely a thing you hear about more and more.
Talk to me about that aspect of male friendship for you guys.
David: In modern life—with parenting, work, and the way life is, we're all on screens—it can be tough. We, in our own ways, do really prioritize consciously to keep those friendships alive and make sure that we take time and space for them.
Craig: That said, because we all work together so often, sometimes we look at each other and we're like, "Hey, we should hang out"—even when we're in the middle of a project. It's something that we need to conscientiously do. Also, comparable penis size helps, because there's not this hierarchy in the relationship.
David: Speak for yourself, dude.
Ken: I've thought about this a lot, and I think we're incredibly lucky to have found each other, because not everybody has what we have and has maintained a male friendship like the one we have. For me, that comes from working together, sure, but also communicating with each other that we appreciate, value, and love each other—and to say it, because I think males don't say that as much as they probably should to the people that they care about in general.
Craig: Interestingly though, our kids, I've noticed, do.
Ken: That's because they're our kids.
Craig: Yeah, I assume it might be because of modeling. Lennon and all of his friends say "I love you" to each other—and not all of their parents are necessarily as warm and squishy as we are. So I wonder if it's a generational thing, or just that we're in a bubble. It's probably the latter.
You guys are playing some Wet Hot American Summer music on this tour. Craig, a lot of the music you've made for David's films strikes this balance between being funny and functional. The song that opens Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass almost immediately reminded me of "Say You Love Me" from They Came Together.
Craig; I actually didn't notice that until it was written. After it was done, I was like, "Oh, I think this has the same structure as 'Say You Love Me'." What was our temp [song] there originally?
David: The opening song from The Devil Wears Prada.
Craig: They had already cut to it, and so it needed to be the same rhythm and a similar vibe. Our pal Amy Miles and I were collaborating on all of the songs for the movie, and out popped this little—
Ken: [Sings] "Suddenly I see!"
Craig: "Say You Love Me" is a '90s rom-com parody. "Suddenly I See" has that too.
David: It's almost like "Say You Love Me" and that other song got together and had a baby.
Ken: That's great. [Turns to me] Did you get that?
I think so. It's funny, because you refer to something like "Say You Love Me" as parody, but it doesn't necessarily have a snide or mocking affect.
Craig: The songs that we do—just like the movies that we make that are parodies—they start and end with a love for the things that we're parodying. There's never an arm's length-iness to it, hopefully.
David: One of the apexes of that is "Higher and Higher," where it's just such an incredible song, and also a joke at the same time. In so much of our comedy, our joke is that we're just doing the thing, and that's the perfect parallel language in the way Craig creates certain things. You're just like, "Yes, it's the right idea."
Going back to the band, have there been any covers that you haven't been able to make work yet?
David: Yes.
Ken: What have we tried that we can't make?
David: One of the ones we gave up on, at least for the moment, was "D'yer Mak'er."
Ken: That's a really hard one to do. We tried one that I really wanted to do: DeBarge's "I Like It." You could do the falsetto—I don't know if I could do it now—but then it gets crazy high. I was like, "We could do that song if we just bring it down an octave and make our own version of it."
Craig: Or if one of the girls goes high.
Ken: There's another one that we did way back when that I hope we bring back at some point, which is The Who. Which one was it?
Craig: One of the later ones.
Ken: [Starts singing "You Better You Bet"]
David: We really bond on forgetting lots of things.
Ken: Yes, as we've gotten older, that's really what keeps us together. A lot of times, we just hang out and try to remember each other's names.
David: Or the name of the person we just spent a week with.
Craig: I've never had a good memory, so I'm just happy everybody's catching it.
Eariler today, I had somebody ask me how my Saturday was going. [Editor's Note: This interview took place on a Friday.]
David: Literally, a friend of mine this morning was like, "I have the day off today, I'm so excited." And I was like, "But it's Saturday."
Every single person I've mentioned to that I'm doing this interview is familiar with the band. It seems like something that's really caught on with people. What's been surprising in terms of audience reactions in the live shows?
Craig: I'd say just the overall joy bomb of it, which we feel in the garage—but you never know how it's going to translate. It's like the room is one band, which is great.
Ken: We have a couple of professional musicians in our band who've played with many different people, and they're like, "This is unusual." What happens is, people come to see us because they think it's going to be a comedy show, and they're not expecting the band to be good or tight. We try our best to play the music as well as we can, and as tight as we can—and sometimes, we succeed, and people are very surprised by that. They come and they're like, "The music is fucking fun and good."
David: And we're not doing the music as a joke.
Ken: But then we also give them the giggles that they came for, so they're already gonna be in a good mood. That's what creates this unusually fun, positive vibe where everybody's down to listen and play.
Craig: And it's not like a wedding band, where it's cold—not that we won't play your wedding.
Ken: We have played one wedding.
Craig: There's a warmth to it, and I'm sure it's because of our friendship and community, and because it isn't perfect and we let the seams show. It's very inviting to people.
David: It's very much the same formula that I saw the first time I saw the guys that became The State on stage. They're having fun up there, it's inclusive.
What was the wedding you guys played?
David: I got a random request out of the blue from somebody who'd seen us on YouTube.
Craig: They're divorced now.
Really?
Craig: No.
David: We're playing the divorce.
Ken: It was crazy. They flew us out, we did their wedding, and we were a wedding band. We were super nervous. The guy was a big fan, but we didn't do any bits because it was a wedding. Nobody else had a clue anyway.
In terms of modern music, what are you guys into? I feel like it's always the most annoying question in the world to ask people who are making or playing music.
David: But you're doing it anyway.
I'm doing it anyway! I have no choice.
David: I like the new stuff, like Paula Cole. [Ken and Craig laugh]
Is there stuff you guys absorb from your kids?
Craig: Yes. We were just driving in the car with our boys, and we were passing off DJ duties and listening to some This is Lorelei. I'm a big Water From Your Eyes fan, and I love the band SML very much. I've been listening to a lot of Ghost Dubs lately. There's so much new music. It's very overwhelming. We were listening to the new Charli XCX album in the car, which is awesome. Even the new Rolling Stones—
Ken: I really like the new Rolling Stones. By the way, Stevie Wonder's putting out songs that he never put out from when he did Songs in the Key of Life. That's incredible.
I just want to address that, we're doing this stupid band, we were all playing in the garage, but the fact that Craig is here with us—a professional, incredible musician who's hanging out with us, this famous frontman—just hanging out and singing songs old covers. That blows my mind. You're, like, a gigantic rock star.
Craig: We're just with each other in this weird bubble of farts.
Ken: Sometimes people write something on social media where they'll be like, "Craig is there?!?" And I'm like, "Alright! Craig is slumming with us." It's fucking awesome.